Saul and Patsy [Hardcover]

Charles Baxter (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: see notes for publisher info (1993)
• ASIN: B000ON40LS
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing and beautiful, September 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Saul and Patsy: A Novel

This book is so extraordinary -- I am a fan of Charles Baxter's and was waiting for it, but had no idea what a massive, exciting, heartrending, and gripping story it would be. This is much more than a family story, or a love story, or a beautiful, complex portrait of a marriage, though it's all those things. It's the story of our time and our embattled world. It's an examination, via the lives of a few small-town characters, of a world where terrorism and the spirits of mischief run wild. Love and destructiveness, the desire for happiness and the desire to do damage, the longing for the perfect lives we imagine others to have, and the harm we are willing to do them because of these imaginings...it's all in here.

The characters are so human, the observations about them so wonderfully written and so full of depth and surprises. This novel is a masterpiece, a permanent work of literature. It makes demands on you, but is incredibly gripping. It also has a brilliant, inventive structure that reinforces the themes and events of the book. I was up very late with it, and finished it with such happiness that I had to tell someone (you, whoever you are, who are reading this!) I'm writing this because I long to discuss it with someone, but don't want to give away any of the intricate turns of plot and the great connections.

Oh, lucky readers who get to experience this for the first time, lovers of great fiction, do yourself a favor and read this book!

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A big yawn..., November 30, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Saul and Patsy: A Novel

Yes, I agree with the other reviewers that Baxter displays a keen sense of language and there are occasional light touches that made me snicker. However, the problem for me is that I don't give a hoot for Saul and this feeling remains unchanged by the end of the book. When I turned the last page, I was just glad to be done with a boring book.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I almost hate myself for this review, March 3, 2007

By 

Mr. Richard K. Weems "emperor_weems" (Fair Lawn, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saul and Patsy (Paperback)

I have no doubt that Charles Baxter will be noted as one of our most thoughtful and philosophic American writers of this time period. He has moved impressively from short story collections (my experience with his work started with _A Relative Stranger_) to a full-blown novelist. Even from his first novel, _First Light_, Baxter has shown a great mixture of a kind of old-school character depth, with high school teachers able to discuss railroad companies and quote classics in normal conversation, mixed in with a clearly modern sense of the world. His characters remind me somewhat of people who occupy Tony Hoagland poems--people who seem to be stuck in a netherworld of intelligentsia and down-home simplicity. _The Feast of Love_ was a good choice as a finalist for an NBA--perhaps it should have won, but I haven't yet read the competition and winner.

But this novel doesn't ring out like other works, and it seems to spend too long mulling about with little engagement. I almost regret saying these things, and almost feel that I need to rethink my priorities, that maybe I've become a jaded or oversimplified reader, for I very nearly put down this book after about forty pages because I was feeling that Baxter was a little more invested in the young couple that is the primary focus of this book than he was able to convey to me.

To tell the truth, the only thing that really brought me back to this book to gut it out and read through the rest is that the back cover promised some violence, something I would not have predicted from my initial experience in the reading.

Now I really feel ashamed. Baxter is such a wonderful writer, who is able to take the oft-used gimmick of quirkiness and use it to his advantage. Usually, his characters engage me me solely for their oddities that bring out their humanity rather than display their eccentricities. But even with the promised violence of this book, I remained unengaged to the end.

I think Baxter is a wonderful writer. Really. And it is the truly fantastic writer who gets the job done, who finishes a work even though lightning hasn't struck yet and do his job and get his efforts out there into the world.

But unfortunately, this one just wasn't one of his best efforts. But I shouldn't be the one to talk--after all, HE is the one who later put out _The Feast of Love_ and very nearly got one of the big prizes, and I just sit here typing this review.